Apparent Opposites
by Thalia Kendall
Summary: [No one really understands.] One was the perfect little princess, the other the eccentric outcast. Cho Chang, Luna Lovegood, and a friendship that sprung from the one thing they had in common. Genfic non-ship one-shot.


A/N: Written for an hour challenge, on a concept that had been bugging me for a while. No romance is meant to be implied, just an unlikely friendship.

Disclaimer: If people read a few of my other fics, they would come to the quick understanding that Roger Davies, not I, owned Cho Chang. 

~*~

Any given person asked about it would have said that they were wholly different; opposites.  
  
Cho Chang was an exotically beautiful princess with raven hair, a tinsel-bright smile surrounded by a group of pretty girls like handmaidens who wanted to be her. Seeker, Prefect, perfect in a way that the general populace almost found cloying, even though they couldn't help but smile at her brilliance and friendliness, or in a polished sort of sympathy at her sorrows. Pixy-petite and stronger than she looked, she walked the hallways of the school always in the center of a group, though always the quietest. Her books were always organized and her robes were always perfectly in place, and when she dove for the Snitch in Quidditch games, the sorrow-blue material swirled gracefully around her like the petals of a delphinium. She was a flower behind glass, perhaps, or a nymph trapped atop a pedestal, her heart encased in unforgiving marble perfection.  
  
Luna Lovegood was a strange, fey-like girl-child with hair that hung around her in limp, slightly wavy strands the colour of candlelight, and her eyes were always far away. It was unnerving, almost, the way she stared into space, as if investigating something that no one else could see. Luna always walked alone, her gait wavering like a willow tree on a windy day, and unless others came to make sport, they gave her a wide berth in the hallways. No one knew, really, if she was friendly or smart, though the general opinion on madness was almost universal. Her face was buried in a copy of the Quibbler more often than not, and if people had taken the time to care, they might have wondered if her expression, when thus hidden, would have shown something more than blank dreaminess. She didn't seem to care much about public opinion, since nothing she did was approved of, but then again, unless she was the spectacle, she was hidden, a shadow, and no one really knew for sure.  
  
And then one windy evening outside on the Quidditch pitch, as one girl read alone and the other, surrounded by brawny boys, pursued her lonely goal, it somehow came to be that the two met truly face to face. Over a snatched book and sharp words they became friends, and the whispers started amongst the Ravenclaws. Perhaps Chang was truly off her rocker; perhaps the deranged Potter boy's problems were infectious, and during their princess's brief liaison with _that_ individual, she'd succumbed to madness. A few of Cho's loyal, supportive female friends declared it charity work.  
  
Luna didn't truly have many friends, certainly not enough of them to gossip about who she associated with. Ron Weasley shook his head and muttered about how she had gone truly barking mad at last: the sniffling little bint who had given Harry so much trouble and aggravation?! Harry cautiously avoided talking about anything personal with her, but then again that wasn't unusual. Ginny smiled a bit awkwardly, but tried her best to stop the boys from making too many loud remarks, and Luna's face remained impassive as a mask.  
  
Really, it was the two so-different girls themselves that figured it out later on, one day on a grassy knoll in Hogsmeade over bottles of butterbeer and books (The Seeker's Guide to Professional Quidditch for Cho, A Collective Anthology of Quibbler Musings for Luna). Her crisp, well-tailored pleated skirt gracefully pooling around her legs, Cho turned to her unlikeliest friend with a sad smile. "No one really understands."  
  
And Luna, wearing a faded blue cotton dress that used to be her mother's accentuated with a necklace made from poppy seedpods strung together, nodded in silent agreement.  
  
Marietta Edgecombe arrived a while later and led Cho off to see a "perfectly _darling_ dragonhide handbag" at one of the shops, and Luna picked up her book and walked off shortly afterwards to the post office with a letter to her father that she'd been meaning to send. Idly, as she walked towards the birds, she wondered which of them had it worse.


End file.
